ARR offers the ability to increase Web app scalability through rule-based routing, load balancing and distributed disk caching. With ARR, Applied Innovations is able to optimize resource utilization for application servers so we are able to offer our clients powerful and flexible hosting solutions at a dramatically reduced cost.
Benefit #1: Maximize Resource Utilization by Balancing Loads More Efficiently Across Servers
ARR allows us the ability to create powerful routing rules based on the URL, HTTP headers and server variables to determine the most appropriate application server for each request. Because ARR makes request routing decisions at the application level, we can also use it in conjunction with hardware load balancers or Windows Network Load Balancing as an added layer of control over HTTP requests. In addition, ARR enables us to route requests from clients to specific Web application servers in a server farm by creating an affinity between the client and server.
Benefit #2: Optimize Bandwidth and Scale Server Capacity with Disk Caching
ARR is able to cache on disk any HTTP traffic that passes through the server. By combining disk caching with a hierarchy of IIS Web servers running ARR, Appliedi has the power to considerably reduce the network traffic that traverses up to the origin server. This feature makes it possible to use our primary HTTP network infrastructure to cache the content closer to the client and make the delivery more efficient. For example, by combining the use of ARR and IIS Live Smooth Streaming, we see dramatically improved delivery for live and on demand video events in true HD quality (720p+).
Benefit #3: More Easily Manage and Monitor Multiple Server Farms
ARR allows the team at Applied Innovations to create, manage, and apply load balancing rules to our server using IIS Manager. We can easily add or remove servers from a server farm to match demand throughput without impacting application availability. ARR also includes live traffic and URL test monitoring capabilities to determine the health of individual servers and configuration settings, while allowing our Systems Administrators to view aggregated runtime statistics in IIS Manager.
Read the Atlantic Cutlery Case Study for a perfect illustration of how Applied Innovations used a Cloud-based virtualized solution, powered by Microsoft technologies such as ARR, to handle a potentially crippling anticipated traffic burst for a long time valued customer.